Journeys From the Horizons of History:

Text, Trial and Tales in the Construction of

Narratives of Pain
Premesh Lalu and Brent Harris
Horizon: limit ofmental perception, understanding, experience and interest.
(Concise Oxford Dictionary)
If the subaltern can speak then, thank god, the subaltern is not a subaltern
any more. (Spivak 1989:283)
Judicial commission? Church service? Theatre? Group therapy? Funeral?
In the end, as in the beginning it was none of those things. (Beresford 1996)
In its quest to uncover the truth about gross human rights violations, the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has brought the discussion on facts,
truth, memory, evidence and the production of history into the public domain
in an unprecedented manner. South Africa's repressed voices, its traumas, have
become a feature of intense public debate. History, it seems, is being made,
written, spoken and used to build a new nation. In the perception of the TRC,
history lies waiting to be uncovered — the facts are self-explanatory, and when
compiled will provide a common past for all South Africans — or so it is
assumed. Premised on the desire to reconcile and unite the nation, the TRC has
embarked upon a project of making memories "widely available so that the
memory of a country can be restored and our whole past can be acknowledged
by all" (Krog 1995:118).
The descriptions of the experience of tyranny and trauma — the stories that
abound from victims and survivors, bystanders and perpetrators — shift the
boundaries of the commission and destabilise linear constructions of a "shared
national memory". But what occurs when these stories are subjected to the ritual
procedures of contextualisation by the TRC and when they are appropriated by
academics who will be expected to provide a synthesis out of what appears to
be disparate episodes of personal trauma? The question that needs to be asked,

CURRENT WRITNG 8(2) 1996 ISSN 1013-929X

 Horizons of History

in the end, as in the beginning, to echo Dipesh Chakrabarty in another post-

colonial setting, is who speaks for South African pasts?
In Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding (1982), Hans
Robert Jauss reproaches historians for failing to explore the concept of"horizon"
when interpreting texts. The horizon, he suggests, is central to interpretations
of texts, and "constitutes all structures of meaning related to human action and
primary modes of comprehending the world" (Jauss 1982:197). For Jauss, the
failure to acknowledge this concept has resulted in a mediative distance between
the alien horizons of the text and the interpretive horizons of the historian (199-
207).
The title for this article, and indeed much of what we will argue, draws
inspiration from Jauss's theorisation of the concepts of horizon, reception, and
construction. The problem we confront relates to the way we receive, interpret,
and apply texts without cognisance ofthe ways our horizons advance, limit, and
intersect with a multiplicity of meanings that might not have been foreseen by
the text's contemporaries. What are the distances between public encounters
with the past on the one hand, and on the other the testimonies heard by the
commission or readings of trauma offered by social scientists and historians?
In this paper we wish to offer a tentative response to this question by reflecting
on various readings of the trial of Andrew Zondo and the public testimony of
Lephina Zondo at the TRC. We are interested in the ways in which truths, and
histories, are produced "by virtue of multiple forms of constraint" (Foucault
1980:131).
The Burden of Positivism and Context
In a recent consideration of the approaches to evidence, Carlo Ginzburg argues
that, apart from certain classic traditions, the epistemological parting of ways
between the historian and the judge are quite apparent. Ginzburg's unravelling
of the complex procedures entailed in the historians' encounter with evidence,
he claims, is far from being a retreat into positivism. Evidence, in his view, is
not "an open window that gives us direct access to reality", but neither is it "a
wall, which by definition precludes any access to reality" (Ginzburg 1994:294).
Both Carlo Ginzburg and Arnold I. Davidson argue that the tension between the
historian and the judge is located in their divergent objectives. They see the
difference in that, for the judge, evidence is used "in the service of establishing
a just verdict" based on absolute certainty of guilt, "beyond any reasonable
doubt" (Davidson 1994:307-309), while for the historian, a plausible inter-
pretation of the evidence "is relevant for securing a truthful account of events"
(Ginzburg 1994:302).

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

In 1987, Skotaville Publishers issued Fatima Meer's book, The Trial of

Andrew Zondo: A Sociological Insight. Meer, who was a lecturer in the
Sociology Department at the University of Natal,Durban at the time, set out to
record the events and circumstances surrounding Andrew Zondo's trial and his
subsequent execution.
In her book Fatima Meer seems to have inadvertently opened up the question
of the differences between approaches to evidence within the legal system, and
the approaches adopted by historians and sociologists. Her book is an attack on
the positivism and the reductive, almost anti- historical, tendencies of the South
African legal system in determining Andrew Zondo's guilt. In its place she
substituted a reading of Zondo's life that sought to contextualise Zondo beyond
23 December 1985, the day on which he planted a bomb at an Amanzimtoti
shopping centre on the Natal south coast. Zondo was sentenced to death five
times for planting this bomb. As Meer tells us in the opening lines of her book,
the bomb resulted in the death of "[a] baby, a young boy, a girl and two women",
and the injury of "seventeen white men and boys, twenty- eight white women
and girls, one Black man and two Black women" (Meer 1987:3).
Far from being a narrative account of the trial proceedings, Meer's book
seems to have been an intervention in and a challenge to the procedures of legal
institutions in South Africa, especially their positivist metalanguage, and the
workings ofthe wider "repressive and ideological state apparatus". Meer claims
that the trial omitted an understanding of the context which prompted Zondo's
act. As she proclaims:
The court took an ahistorical view of behaviour, emptying it of its
experiential and interactional content. It treated each piece of behaviour as
an independent, unconnected entity. It separated Andrew Zondo on the
23rd December,fromAndrew Zondo at all other times in his history. It did
not want to enter into psychological or sociological dialectics which
deflectedfromthe bombing. (65)
Meer's book could be read as a response to the rhetorical discourse of legal
procedure, and to its reductionism in establishing the "truth". It is against this
backdrop and interpretation that The Trial of Andrew Zondo is set. Meer's
intention appears to have been to establish a different truth, one that is situated
firmly in a historical context and determined by the essential human right to
justice and redress.
The book is divided into four parts. Part One, entitled "The Arrest of Andre w
Zondo", opens with a brief reflection on the bomb blast (3-4) followed by
Andrew Zondo's appearance in court. As he is brought to trial, we hear his voice
for the first time:

26
 Horizons of History

It was a great reliefto be out ofmy cell. For two months I only saw the police.
Only once, when I knocked on my cell wall, had I an answer. I found a senior
comrade detained in the next cell. In the night when the guards left and we
were alone, we talked. He asked me how I was. I told him "okay". Then I
told him "I know you can't like me. I have done wrong. People died." He
consoled me and said "it was an accident." I said, "They will hang me." He
said I must not talk like that. The next night there was no one in that cell.
(5)
Zondo'sfirstwords in the book are important in setting the tone and demarcating
the space within which his fate would be decided. This was alien territory,
marked by a sense of insecurity and solitude. It was a world away from the
comforts of home, away from the familiar, away from the support of comrades
— and of his accomplice.
In these opening chapters, Meer and Zondo project a deep suspicion of the
judicial courts which are represented here as extensions ofthe enemy's domain.
In so doing, they stress the commonality of this perception among many black
South Africans: she by evoking the testimony presented by Nelson Mandela at
his trial three decades earlier (8); he through his suspicion of pro deo council
(7). Particularly through the voice of Andrew Zondo, and by invoking the
framework of the struggle, Meer brings into question the legitimacy and
authority of the Apartheid State and its legal system.
But she also utilises the opportunity to introduce two points upon which she
constructs her own narrative: the first is the relationship between Zondo, a
militant political activist, and his deeply religious parents; the second is the
contrast between his intense opposition to the state and his respect and care for
his family. Ultimately, she questions the validity of the judgement on Andrew
Zondo and the truth claims of the South African judicial system.
The use of the metaphor of a journey in biography emphasises continuity and
inevitability. In Part Two of her book, Fatima Meer relies on this metaphor to
reconstitute Andrew Zondo, the subject of the trial. Here we meet Zondo, born
into a religious family, cast into hardship, illness, and relative poverty. Meer
describes as littered with contrasts his journey from a small hospital in Port
Shepstone, where he was born, to the Scottsburgh Courthouse, where he was
tried. As Andrew Zondo recalls:
We lived in a house that belonged to the church on church property. My
father was the minister there. But the White ministers who came there were
always the most important people. They had cars, and they came to fetch us
and take us to their homes.... I did not understand why we had to go to their
house. I was always very uncomfortable there.... It made me conscious of
myself as an African. (23)

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

In highlighting similar contrasts, Meer represents Andrew Zondo's experiences

as the general experience of black South Africans. For Zondo this experience
ultimately led to his decision to join the ANC and to plant the bomb. Meer
presents Zondo's life history as inevitable, literally consisting of a historically-
driven beginning, middle, and end.
Part Three reproduces selections of the court proceedings, with special
emphasis on the testimonies of Andrew Zondo (105-126) and the anonymous
accomplice-turned-state-witness (93-126). Meer extracts that part of the record
which seeks to establish Zondo's frame of mind, his sanity, or lack thereof, at
the time of the bombing. She emphasises the bias of the court in its denial of
Andrew Zondo's history of "mental illness" (61-79). The state "rejected the
defence inference that psychiatry was not an exact science" (81-90) and made
counter claims of Zondo's ability to comprehend and project rationally upon his
deeds and predicament.
The court records, reproduced in Part Three, form the basis of continuous
commentary by Meer. For Meer two problems surfaced around the trial itself.
One was a denial of the larger historical context of Andrew Zondo's life, the
other was the falsification that took place through the course of the trial with
regard to Zondo's mental state. In relation to the latter, Meer refers to the doctor
who was recommended by Captain Botha earlier in 1983, for what Andrew
Zondo's father, the Reverend Aiken Zondo, felt was a mental illness. At the
hearing a doctor claimed that his partner had examined Zondo for what was
diagnosed as "joint pains" (90). According to Meer, Andrew and his father
independently denied that they had consulted the doctor for pain in the joints.
Andrew is reported to have said later that:
That doctor... [h]e said I had a pain in my legs. I never ever had pain in my
legs. My parents are not silly to take me to the doctor for a pain in my legs....
When I got to the surgery, I was confused. I was asleep. I just got up there.
He gave me an injection and I slept.... [The police] brought him to give the
evidence against me. (90-91)
And Reverend Zondo said that:
they had taken Andrew to the doctor because of his deeply disturbed mental
state after his detention [in 1983], that they had discussed his condition with
the police who had actually paid for them to take him to the doctor. He said
that the doctor was told about the mental state, and asked to treat that mental
state. There was no question whatsoever about any sort of physical pain.
The doctor had lied. (91)
Meer, however, acknowledges the court's claims to truths. In the readings of
both the court and Fatima Meer, the meaning of an event is located firmly in its

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 Horizons of History

historical context, so that history becomes the arbiter of truth (Himmelfarb

1995:131). But for Meer, the court' s vulgar reduction of that historical context
is problematic. She argues that legal judgements and truths can only be
established through employing an enlarged historical context. In making this
argument, she suggests that legal trials are only capable of establishing limited
"truths" because of their procedural claims to authority and the constraints of
judicial rules.
The court has tremendous authority and its ruling is binding on society. It
deliberates in terms of its own procedural rules and looks for consistency
within these. But rules are relative. A sociologist or psychiatrist would
hardly find the court's approach in this particular context acceptable. To
uncover the truth they would attempt to resurrect the whole personality, to
attempt to understand its total meaning, by integrating the past with the
present, by unravelling and restoring repressed memories to comprehend
the rationale for a particular act. From the sociological standpoint, the court
was atomising Andrew Zondo and judging, not the whole Andrew Zondo,
but a legal abstraction, that Andrew Zondo at 1 Oam on December 23rd who
had laid a mine and who since had become a memory in time as the act itself.
In a sense the court had created a legal fiction to pursue its work ofjustice....
What Andrew Zondo would be left in court if he was decimated into one
event in his life. (Meer 1987:65)
Reflecting on the approaches of both judicial and sociological notions of truth,
Meer sets out to construct a history of the accused within a context of politics
and experience so as to achieve a greater truth. She establishes a causal
succession by replacing a judicial reading of Andrew Zondo with one in which
the rhetoric of historical contextualisation looms large. In her view, the
construction of an authentic explanation for Zondo's action is therefore
dependent on constructing a life in its entirety.
For Meer the notion of context is a linear construction, one in which a
continuity between the past and the present is constituted; in this the present
invokes the past, and the past informs the present.
Finally, in Part Four, Andrew Zondo's journey comes to an end when:
[he] made his last trip to the court on the moming of April 2. It was a clear
summer day and the Indian Ocean was the bluest of blue. But young Andrew
Zondo neither saw the sea, nor was he conscious of it.... (161: our emphasis)
The trial comes to an end with the closing arguments, and the conviction of
Andrew Zondo as recounted by Meer. Here Meer's own narrative comes to the
fore as she uncovers and presents numerous lacunae in the reasoning in the
judgement of Andrew Zondo. She questions the overall reliability of the
evidence presented by accomplice-tumed-state-witness when she states that:

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

The court was aware of the dangers of evidences given by the Accomplice,
that he would try and implicate the Accused, minimise his own role in the
commissioning of the act, and worsen that of the Accused's, and that his
moral position was in question being an Accomplice in a serious crime.
(143: our emphasis)
She then highlights, by speaking for Zondo, the discrepancies in the trial that
culminated in the judgement. The images of Zondo's solitude presented in the
opening chapters are mirrored in these closing chapters but here Meer represents
a marked irony:
Two men had set out on the 23rd of December 'carrying death' in their bag.
Together they had planted a mine; together they had left the scene, and
thereafter turned their backs on the consequences of their act, The one had
claimed that he had attempted to phone in a warning: the other made no such
claims. The first man was hanged, the other lives.... (163)
Thereafter, Meer invokes her own historical contextualisation ofthe planting of
the bomb, and of the 'struggle' as a whole, tracing a circle of retribution and
revenge which is projected backwards into the distant past of "the seventeenth
century when the Khoi had made their first guerrilla attack on the Dutch who
had occupied their Cape coast and proceeded to push them into the interior"
(164: our emphasis).
Lephina Zondo's Testimony
Lephina Zondo appeared before the TRC on 10 May 1996. Her testimony,
presented in Zulu, was translated for the media and the commissioners into
English. Her testimony is a transcript of the SABC's recording of the Durban
TRC hearing of 10 May 1996. We reproduce the translated testimony of
Lephina Zondo here.
Alex Boraine (TRC Commissioner):... a first word to you is a word of warm welcome.
We thank you very much for coming to the commission and we look forward to
hearing your story which is about the execution of your son Andrew but also some
attacks on your house which happened to you.
Before we hear the story though, a story of great pain, I want you to please stand
to take the oath.... Thank you very much. Mrs Zondo, we always ask some one to
help the witness in telling their own story and today I'm that person for you so I'm
going to ask you to tell something about your life.
You live in KwaMashu, is that right?
LZ: I live with my family. It's my husband and four children. It's Irene, she's now
working, Sandile, he is studying, and Lincoln and the other one are at the primary
school.
AB: But another son whose name was Andrew and he was doing matric. Tell me about
that. Tell us about that.

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 Horizons of History

LZ: Andrew left home when he was sixteen and we searched all over for him but we
couldn't find him. After his disappearance we stayed home, we were not free, we
did not know whether he was alive or not. One day the police arrived and they told
us that they got him, they found him. The police told us that it's better to go and see
him where he had been arrested. When we went to see him, he was at Westville
Prison. We've been visiting him many times and there was a court case and we went
to Scottsville (sic) where the case was listened to for the last time. Andrew asked
us not to come — me and his father — he said he doesn't want us to be there. He
said he didn't want to be sentenced while we are in the same room.
There was a lawyer, Bheka, [who] represented him. He came back [and] told us
that [Andrew had] been sentenced to death five times because of what he did at
Amanzimtoti. They took him to Pretoria, they transferred him to Pretoria. We
visited him quite often [there], he didn't spend quite a long time at that prison. The
police arrived at home to tell us that the day has arrived for him to be hanged, and
they said we should go and see him. We left as a family... We stayed there for the
weekend.
They said we can stay in Pretoria but we'll never see his body. We said: "Yes,
that is better. Can you make it possible so that we can see his body?"
They said: "No. You will not see his body. You won't be allowed to see his body.
You can go and attend the church service but you will never see the body."
We felt that if we go and don't see the body because it's our tradition, before a
person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is therightperson.
And thereafter we came back and they buried him.
They said they would bury him at Mamelodi and they said they would give us
a death certificate after that, but we never received any death certificate.
There was this heavy burden in our hearts. Why didn't they give us the body
because they already hanged him. They said no, it's the law, they had to bury him.
They said even if we can go we will not see him.
After that there was a memorial service at our house ... [in] KwaMashu. Young
and old people attended the service, especially the ones who were UDF during that
time. There were others who didn't belong to any organization but most members
of the UDF were there. A week had gone by before he could be buried. I don't know
whether had he been buried or not, but even after the burial they would come to our
house.
One day when they were leaving my house two children were shot dead. These
are the children who attended the memorial service and one day, when the memorial
service was continuing, the police arrived. On their arrival, they surrounded the
house and that time we were singing nkosi sikelel' iAfrika. We were just about to
finish the service and the police came in large numbers.... They beat up the youth.
They didn't touch me. They assaulted the children, the youth, that were in the house.
Duduza,... my son, was also there. He was heavily assaulted. During the time
he had epilepsy. Since ... that incident, he gets these attacks and he passed away.

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

Every time since that day he would go to bed and he would cry and say: "Mom, here
are the police, they are attacking me", and every time, when he cried, I would go to
his room to make sure he was alright. He was attacked by epilepsy 'till he died. I
was now left with the remaining ones. They are still alive.
But I must say, during the service the police assaulted the youth terribly. The
blood was full in the church and me and my husband were supposed to clean that
blood. Dishes were broken...
AB: Don't... don't rush. When you are ready then you can continue.... Is that your full
story?
LZ: Yebo [yes].
AB: Thank you. I won't keep you long because you have carried a very heavy load and
you have been very brave. Just one or two short questions.
How old was Andrew when he died?
LZ: He was about to finish his twenty years.
AB: Mrs Zondo, do you remember ever having a meeting with a Mr Smit whose child
had died in the bomb attack at Amanzimtoti. Do you remember meeting him?
LZ: Yes, I remember.
AB: Was that a good and helpful meeting for you?
LZ: Yes, that helped me a lot.
AB: Mr Smit came before the commission in Gauteng and he told us about what had
happened to his child and he said that he had forgiven Andrew and that he had been
very pleased to meet with you so I thought I'd just ask how you felt about that.
I want to askyou just one or two questions about the police attacking your home,
the memorial service.
Where did the police come from?
LZ: They came from KwaMashu.
AB: Thank you. Do you remember any of them, did you know them or can you tell us
who they were?
LZ: I don't know who they were.
AB: Mrs Zondo, the commission is here to share in your pain and your distress. Is there
anything that you would like the commission to do if the commission had the power
to do that? Is there anything more you want to say?
LZ: I would request the commission to replace the furniture that belonged to the church
and we do not have a death certificate and we cannot go to the place where my son
is buried.
AB: Mrs Zondo, we will certainly consider your request and we will very definitely be
able to get hold of the death certificate so that you can have it. We will also make
enquiries, I'm really not sure what the law is, but we will make enquiries about you
son's body and we will come back to you and tell you what we have found out. I
hand you now over to the chairperson.
LZ: Thank you very much.

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The Historian, the Commission and the Context

A workshop of historians and social scientists held in Cape Town on 11 March
1995, noted that a considerable input to the structure, establishment, and the
modus operandi of the TRC had been made by religious leaders and social
welfare and mental health professionals. The report expressed regret that "the
perspectives of historians and social scientists had been largely absent [from the
process] so far", warning that, "if not corrected, [this] might lead to important
distortions and gaps in the work of the TRC" (Historians, Social Scientists, and
the TRC Workshop, 1995). For the historians and social scientists gathered at
the workshop, the TRC was constrained by its legalistic approach to questions
of evidence, and to questions of truth and reconciliation. What was absent from
this approach was the historical and social dimensions, which, it was assumed,
could best be rectified via the employment of the historians' and social
scientists' skills.
In locating academic discourses within the ongoing deliberations ofthe TRC,
the workshop emphasised a perspective that Andre Odendaal, of the Mayibuye
Centre at the University of the Western Cape, had made earlier in arguing for
historians to associate themselves more closely with the TRC:
The task of historians is to recover historical evidence, reconstruct past
processes and events and help to create an understanding within society and
where it is going. In South Africa this is a doubly difficult and doubly
important task. We are faced firstly with the problem that the majority of
people in the country have been deliberately written out of history. In the
memorable words of one of our foremost historians, Colin Bundy, the
official South African history has been "to education what the black hole
is to matter: a kind of anti-knowledge". (Odendaal 1994:5)
For Odendaal, the TRC had a vital function to perform in restoring silenced
voices, and in presenting through an epistemology of evidence, a basis for
reconciliation. Almost a year later, those gathered at the workshop argued, in
a similar vein, that:
A legal or lawyerly approach to the TRC inevitably tends to focus on
questions of individual culpability (of perpetrators) and individual rights to
reparation (of victims). This is appropriate, especially as far as the
investigation of individual cases by [the] Amnesty Committee and the
Committee on Reparation of the TRC are concerned, but it would be a
serious mistake to conceive of the overall task and the basic methodology
of the TRC in terms of an investigation of individual cases only. If the final
report of the TRC would mainly consist of a listing of individual cases, then
this will not necessarily contribute to the furthering ofnational reconciliation.
(TRC Workshop 1995)

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

As an alternative, it was agreed that a great deal depended on the context and
framing of individual cases, during the investigations ofthe TRC, and in its final
report. This, it was believed, could only be attained if "from a historical and
social studies perspective ... the investigations of the TRC be grounded in a
contextual understanding of the particular historical processes, patterns of
social relationships and institutional dynamics relevant to the perpetration of
gross human rights violations during this period" and that "this requirefs] access
to appropriate professional methodologies and expertise" (TRC Workshop
1995).
From thefirstround of public hearings of the TRC, it has become evident that
the testimonies it receives are construed as 'real' stories. But once heard, these
testimonies are open to various processes of validation by researchers and
investigators. Initially, the TRC "really only want[s] some kind of collaborative
evidence—[a certain] level of probability" (Orr etal 1996). Its researchers are
not expected to declare a judgment about the 'validity', beyond any reasonable
doubt, of the evidence presented to them by victims, bystanders, survivors, or
perpetrators, but merely to establish the plausibility of their statements and
testimonies.
For members of the research unit, however, it is imperative that, in the
attempt to present a complete picture "in words", a balance between the
testimonies and a sense of the overall political context within which human
rights violations occurred be established. Here, as in Meer's book, it is
1

proposed that by encapsulating these stories within a 'political' context, we

would be able to "see the picture of the nature of the violations".
For the commission, but more specifically, for historians, stories received are
real only at the level of evidence, of filling a gap within a totality of what has
commonly been referred to as THE South African past. The stories are
subsumed into a predetermined or over-determined context, suggesting, we
would argue, that subaltern narratives are only realisable once filtered by
disciplinary procedures and set against a scientifically established context.
Lephina Zondo's voice is subject to the rules which govern the receipt of a
testimony in much the same way as a document is mined by an historian for
evidence. Her testimony in this instance is read without consideration for
silences and outside of multiple domains of power or its relation to how her
narrative permeates historical constructions. She instead is read as being
without History. She is reduced to a site and an oral source waiting to be
processed by a literate elite and inserted into a 'shared national memory'. She
occupies the realm of the empirical as she becomes a window to our brutal
'reality'.

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 Horizons of History

Lephina Zondo is produced in the same way that Andrew Zondo is in the
sociological intervention offered by Fatima Meer. This production arises out of
the tension between the judge and the historian and is incorporated into
particular discursive fields. Lephina Zondo's own horizons will be read as those
of the social scientists, historians, and the commissioners for whom she is
subject, survivor, witness, and archive. This is apparent in the summary of the
hearing produced by the research unit of the TRC which highlighted the
following aspects of Lephina Zondo's testimony:
When Andrew Zondo was in matric he told his parents he would leave the
country when [he] finished [sic] as he was fed up with the system. His
parents never saw him again although once in 1986 he asked them to meet
him in Umkomaas, but he had left by the time they arrived there. A week
later Andrew was arrested for a bomb blast in an Amazimtoti shopping
centre (in which 5 people were killed). His parents attended his trial in
[Pietermaritzburg] except for the day of the sentencing as he asked them to
stay away. They also visited him on death row in Pretoria where he was
executed on the 8th of September 1987. People were attacked leaving the
KwaMashu memorial service for Andrew, and two ofMajali's grandchildren
were killed. Police assaulted people and destroyed items in the house during
the memorial service, Andrew's brother was seriously assaulted and
subsequently suffered from epileptic [sic] which finally led to his death.
Andrew's mother Lephina has not seen his grave in Mamelodi and was not
allowed to see his body after he was executed.
2

This summary indicates the manner in which Lephina Zondo's testimony is

mined for facts. She is rendered voiceless (literally inaudible by the process of
translation) and is simultaneously produced as the voice of Andrew Zondo or,
at best, of his 'parents'. We learn very little of her pain and personal trauma, of
her concerns with tradition, of her belief systems or of her attitudes towards the
power of dominant groups and her possible solidarity with the dominated.
Reading Lephina Zondo
In presenting Lephina Zondo's testimony we have attempted to uncover the
strategies through which she permeates the worlds of professional historians
and the TRC. We have argued that she is written into history as evidence. In
making this point we are not suggesting that she occupies a different space of
authenticity or agency. On the contrary, we wish to suggest a possible reading
of Lephina Zondo's testimony outside of the authentic/official dialectic, which
by extension proclaims a programmatic agenda for historical scholarship.
An interpretation of Lephina Zondo's testimony which might encourage us
to imagine the world as radically heterogenous is a reading of the silences in her

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Premesh Laiu and Brent Harris

testimony. This approach requires us to read her testimony as a complex

historical narrative, informed by a multiplicity of contexts, and to problematise
the confined political narrative of resistance that invariably reduces 'stories' to
evidence. One possible direction would be to follow Chakrabarty's call for a
history that problematises the modern and "writes over the given and privileged
narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw
sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures" (Chakrabarty 1989:365).
I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure
of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it
plays in collusion with narratives of citizenship in assimilating to the
projects of the modern state all other possibilities ofhuman solidarity. (365)
A reading of the testimonies heard by the TRC, along these lines, compels us
to read for the silences produced in the testimonies and in the numerous
reconstructions of the testimonies. These silences are perpetuated by the
disciplinary distinctions between literacy and orality, self and community,
official and public. In the example of Lephina Zondo we may allude to one
moment in this process of silencing. In her testimony to the TRC, Lephina
Zondo alludes to the transgression of "our tradition" where the body has to be
seen before it is laid to rest "to be sure that it is the right person". Yet in the TRC's
summary of the testimony, cited earlier, there is no mention of her reference to
"tradition" nor consideration of what is implied. Perhaps this is one instance,
among many, where the testimony of subalterns seems incompatible with a
process that is deeply rooted in modernity.
In proposing a shift in the reading of the testimonies presented to TRC we
argue that the horizons of Lephina Zondo should be foregrounded. An emphasis
on subalternity allows us to read these testimonies beyond new hegemonic
projects, systems of legitimation, dominant political discourses and the
overarching context provided by historians, social scientists, and the truth
commission.
Conclusion
Meer's book on the trial of Andrew Zondo highlights the tension between
academic and judicial approaches to evidence. By reflecting on the outcome of
the trial of Andrew Zondo, Meer shows that legal truths are constrained by
narrow readings that neglect larger historical contexts. She argues for a reading
that contextualises and situates Andrew Zondo as a "historical and social
constituent". But in constructing a broader historical context, Meer enlists a
linear narrative that implies an even greater claim to truth than that produced
through the court hearings.

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 Horizons of History

With regard to our discussion of Meer's argument, we have shown that a

"complete picture of gross human rights violations" is dependent on the
synthesis provided by professional scholars and through a construction of a
context relevant to understanding what appear to be disparate narratives of
trauma and pain. While we are not arguing against this project of contextualisation
as it is present in a range of academic, political, and legal discourses that
intersect with the work of the TRC, we suggest opening up a transitionary
moment to a reading ofthe ways in which professional historians are implicated
in the stories which we tell, the silences we force, and the constraints we
encounter and engender.
In this sense we try to show that the rhetoric of contextualisation constrains
the subaltern, and possibly renders her unspeakable (yet again), in a project that
generally attributes its very legitimacy to those subaltern capacities. To alter the
famous dictum of Karl Marx, "men (and women) make history only to be
written out of history by Historians".
In the end, as in the beginning, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will
be but a journey from the horizons of the experiences of 'our subjects' to the
limits of our understanding, our discourses and our interests.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, Carohn Cornell and
Gitanjali Maharaj for initial comments and Andre Odendaal for access to his collection
of truth commission papers.
Note
1. As laid out in the Promotion of Nation Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995.
2. We wish to thank the TRC's Research Unit for making this document available to
us.
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